Reply to S/O victim-blaming

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "S/O victim-blaming - why?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Adults generally have agency, and with agency comes the reality that our choices can place us in certain situations. Agency means our choices matter, sometimes in ways that increase risk, even when harm remains unjustified. Life is rarely a single-cause event. Outcomes often arise from a combination of personal decisions and others’ actions.[/quote]

People who victim-blame tend to believe people have a lot more agency than they do. Most people's lives are restricted in a wide variety of ways -- by money, limited options, their own knowledge and intelligence, social expectations, the influence of fear or other emotions which can cloud judgment.

People love to Monday-morning quarterback a terrible event and second guess every choice made by a victim or their family. With hindsight and full knowledge of the context, it may seem very obvious that someone should have done XYZ to prevent something bad happening. In the moment, people make the best choices they can with what's available to them. Sometimes people do things that seem very stupid in restrospect but if you were in the same situation, you might do the same thing. You're lucky you weren't in that situation.

We also know all kinds of things about how the chemical reactions in our brains react to threats. For a long time people thought the only responses were fight or flight, and we assumed that if someone didn't do one of those things, then they must have consented to a situation. Now we understand that our brains do all kinds of things to try and protect us. "Freeze" is perhaps the most common response to a threat, but it can look like passivity. "Fawn" is also common. These responses are not choices that a person makes with true agency, but a fear response to try and preserve physical or mental safety in the face of limited options. Victim-blamers will treat a freeze response like consent even when it's obvious not, they'll view fawning behavior as complicity.

Most people have limited agency, and certain demographics have even less than the average person -- children, immigrants/refugees, people with disabilities, the elderly, and people who have already survived other trauma. Yet people will look at crimes against these people and assume 100% agency and perfect knowledge, and ignore everything we know about how the human brain works, and blame the victim. All to keep a person with more power and more agency from being held accountable. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics